Architects go green for 2010

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Temporary city farm in Leadenhall Street

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One Hyde Park

Ultimate luxury: One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge where a penthouse will cost a reported £100 million

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The Walbrook

Curves and corners: The Walbrook in the City

Architecture by Rogers Stirk Harbour. "Exclusive interior design" by Candy and Candy. "Legendary service" by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Security by the SAS, or at least with the advice of former SAS "operatives".

This is One Hyde Park, the Xanadu and Fort Knox of modern luxury living, the development whose epic expensive penthouses — a reported £100 million each — have already made headlines.

Its four towers now rise over the tree line of Hyde Park, and the development is due to be completed this autumn. It aims to be, and probably will be, the ultimate in super-expensive apartment buildings.

Here everything from the bullet-proof glass, iris scanners and panic rooms, to the spas and health treatments, to the crisp precision of the architecture, to the prime Knightsbridge location, gives your average squillionaire all the security, and all the massaging of body and ego, that he could possibly want.

One Hyde Park will be one of London's biggest architectural events in 2010, and if its concept does not seem entirely in sync with the zeitgeist, its developers will reassure themselves with the knowledge that the ultra-wealthy never really go away.

It also reflects the fact that, construction being a slow business, it tends to keep on going, like a Looney Tunes character running over a cliff after all visible means of support have been removed.

So cranes are still whirring over the London skyline, and other glossy works by big-name architects are going up.

Foster and Partners' bulbous City office building called The Walbrook, a bit Samurai and a bit Flash Gordon with its overlapping horizontal striations, is nearly complete.

The cladding is now going on to One New Change, Jean Nouvel's office and retail building next to St Paul's. The structure is also nearly complete on KPF's Heron Tower, which will be the tallest building in the City.

But if big corporate stuff is still going up much as it has for a decade, and if the names Foster and Rogers figure as prominently as they have at any time these past 30 years, it's also clear that things won't go on as they have been for ever.

There is a long pent-up feeling among architects that there is more to life than shiny, glossy, "iconic" things, a feeling which might now find expression in things that are actually built.

Or grown, as vegetables are coming into fashion. The Bath-based architects Mitchell Taylor Workshop have proposed a temporary City Farm on the site in Leadenhall Street where Rogers Stirk Harbour's "cheesegrater" tower is due to be built, at some now-deferred point in the future.

The idea of putting marrows and goats, as if in some miniature post-capitalist Eden, on a spot designated for stainless steel and glass, could hardly be more symbolic.

There is also Bankside Urban Forest, a project to make the hard-edged hinterland of Tate Modern more sylvan.

This is both literal — there will be more greenery — and metaphoric, in that the architects Witherford Watson Mann hope to enhance the experience of wandering, as you might in a wood, in the area's little streets.

An early project for the Forest is a Green Arch, in which a brick railway vault is to be smothered in planting.

Thanks to fancy modern technology, greenery will extend to the dark underside where plants don't usually grow.

There is talk, too, of growing temporary tree nurseries, market gardens and allotments on the swathes of empty land that will be left around the Olympic site after 2012, awaiting development.

Paul Finch, the new chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, is an enthusiast for this idea, which increases its chances of happening.

And there is the just-finished arboretum at Barking Town Square, by muf architecture and art.

This is the latest stage in a plan to beautify the battered centre of Barking, whose previous phases included a pretend ruin, like some 18th-century garden folly, built to conceal the rear end of an Iceland.

What these projects have in common is not just a love of growing things but also a desire to adapt what's there, rather than make everything afresh.

There's a willingness to see beauty in viaducts and eastern suburbs.

There's also a wish to connect with people at some level other than visual shock and awe, the thing that John Prescott once called the "wow factor".

A building like One Hyde Park, or The Walbrook, tries to impress you with the force of its shape, and with the collective willpower invested in the consistency of its detail.

It takes a lot of determination to get tonnes of steel and concrete, manoeuvred by expensive machines and hundreds of men on muddy, weatherbeaten sites, to line up exactly as the architect wants it, and you can feel the force of this determination in the completed building.

By contrast, the trees and the faux-ruin of Bankside and Barking try to touch your senses, provoke associations, engage the memory and the imagination.

It's a more fragile, less assertive way of designing places, and it remains to be seen if it will truly flourish in the brutal world of construction and development.

For if 2010 will see the rise of the vegetable and the last hurrah of Noughties über-luxury, there will be huge numbers of less eye-catching projects that will manifest the inexorable march of the project manager.

Many new and refurbished schools will be ground out under the Government's gigantic Building Schools for the Future programme, whose processes eliminate the possibility of delight and quality in the name of efficiency and certainty.

The extended East London line will open, the most significant addition to the Tube network since the Jubilee line extension opened a decade ago, but with considerably less splendid stations.

A bluntly functional bridge, now crossing Shoreditch High Street, and built to serve the East London line, gives an idea of the spirit of the project.

The biggest constructional event of 2010 will be on the site for the Olympics. All the buildings for the Games have to be complete by 2011, which means a succession of them will be substantially finished this year.

The first to be completed is an electrical substation by the Glasgow and Dublin-based practice Nord.

It is a dark brick cuboid, a dignified if sombre work in the traditions of industrial buildings like Bankside power station.

Other Olympic projects will strive to be more jolly and upbeat. The site is impressive, vast in extent, active from end to end, and now marked with the nearly complete stadium and the roof structures of the velodrome and the aquatic centre.

The project has also been marked so far by its relatively low number of bad news stories about overruns of cost and budget, but the big question will be whether the safety-first approach to achieving the Olympics will result in a place of bone-aching, risk-free dullness. 2010 will be the year in which we find out.